Category: Philosophy

Putting Experience Back into View

I finished reading The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson. It is an ambitious book that I think succeeds in its aims. I recommend it highly and hope it is widely read. The authors argue that the great achievements of science have been unfortunately accompanied… Continue reading Putting Experience Back into View

The Question of Artificial Agency

I’m grateful for recent speculations about whether AI systems might achieve human-like intelligence (AGI) and/or sentience. These have led me to think more carefully about the ingredients that go into these capabilities. I think a necessary ingredient is agency, and understanding agency can sharpen our inquiry into the prospects for AI. What is agency and… Continue reading The Question of Artificial Agency

Biological Agency and Free Will

Given my recent interest in the idea of naturalized biological agency (the topic of my last post), I was excited to read Kevin Mitchell’s book—Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will—which develops this notion and connects it to the debate over human free will. Mitchell is a neurogeneticist at Trinity College (Dublin); he blogs… Continue reading Biological Agency and Free Will

The Enactive Approach to Agency

Introduction Explaining the properties and behaviors of organisms leads us to introduce a repertoire of concepts foreign to the world of non-living things. Arguably the most important of these is agency. Agency implies that behaviors are structured by intrinsic goals or purposes, and this brings with it further notions, such as those of norms and… Continue reading The Enactive Approach to Agency

New Work on Causation and Conserved Quantities

I read an interesting and thought-provoking paper: “Causation and the conservation of energy in general relativity” by Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, James Read, and Andrés Páez (forthcoming in The BJPS[1]). The paper is about the apparent problems the general theory of relativity (GR) presents for Phil Dowe’s conserved quantity theory of causation (CQTC). The authors examine… Continue reading New Work on Causation and Conserved Quantities

The “Causal” in a Causal Theory of Spacetime

Across several posts, I have outlined how a causal process theory can provide an attractive ontology for phenomena described by the natural sciences, from quantum physics to biology. An exception, mentioned in a recent post, is that I haven’t had much to say about the spacetime of general relativity (GR). This topic is complicated by… Continue reading The “Causal” in a Causal Theory of Spacetime

Questions About Time and Space

The last post presented a version of causal process theory as a framework for ontology. The world is fundamentally a causal network, made up of persisting causal processes that participate in change-producing interaction events. As I mentioned, many details would need to be filled in to have a more complete picture. Below, I tackle a… Continue reading Questions About Time and Space

Work in Process

There is a contemporary movement among a number of philosophers, inspired by biology, to pursue a process-oriented metaphysics. These theorists argue that standard approaches are inadequate because they do not capture the essentially dynamic nature of biological systems. Traditional ontologies begin with essentially stable building blocks (a “thing” such as a substance, object, or particle).… Continue reading Work in Process

The Causal Roots of Consciousness

In this post I recap my preferred framework for tackling the hard problem of consciousness, and then try to extend the analysis a bit deeper.  I have favored a “divide and conquer” strategy that recognizes two dimensions to the problem. Our conscious experience has both a qualitative character and a subjective character, and both can… Continue reading The Causal Roots of Consciousness